Sunday, October 16, 2011

The country next door "negotiating" in cyberspace

After Raytheon began selling missiles to Taiwan in 2006, the defense company's computer network came under a torrent of cyberattacks.

"We truly had the 'come to Jesus moment' five years ago because we decided ... to sell missiles to Taiwan," said Vincent Blake, head of cyber security at Raytheon U.K., during a panel session at the RSA security conference in London on Wednesday.

"For some reason, a country next door to Taiwan didn't really like that so they got very interested in our IPR [intellectual property rights]," he said. "We've had to very, very rapidly catch up with our own internal networks."

Blake described a "huge leap in attacks" that prompted the company to make cybersecurity one of its top five priorities, and eye security companies for acquisition. Since that time, Raytheon has continued to be an attractive target for hackers, given its breadth of defense technologies that supply militaries around the world.

Now, the company sees an incredible 1.2 billion -- that's billion -- attacks on its network per day, Blake said. About 4 million spam messages target Raytheon's users, and the company sees some 30,000 samples per day of so-called Advanced Persistent Threats, or stealthy malware that seeks to stay long-term on infected computers and slowly withdraw sensitive information.

I put this article up first because it bears on the Michael Swaine piece that I linked to a few posts below this one, whose link is hilariously titled "US-Provoking-China-Over-Taiwan" -- though that is not the current title of the piece. If you compare the links and titles of other National Interest pieces, you'll soon find that the link and title are generally the same. This suggests that the original title or original topic was the outrageous US Provoking China Over Taiwan. A wise change. Swaine writes:

For many U.S. observers, the only "solution" to the intensifying problem created by these factors is to keep selling arms to Taiwan, plow ever-more scarce U.S. resources into maintaining military predominance in the Western Pacific, keep providing verbal assurances to Beijing that it does not support unilateral moves by Taiwan toward independence, and continue urging Taipei and Beijing to work out their differences peacefully. But China's military buildup, its increasing economic and political leverage, and its growing nationalism suggest that a serious future crisis over arms sales will likely occur before any significant movement toward a stable modus vivendi between Beijing and Taipei emerges.

Dear readers, as the piece on Raytheon shows, a serious crisis is already occurring, in the computer networks of companies that sell arms to Taiwan, as 1.2 billion attacks on its network per day. Multiply by alleged Chinese attacks on other US firms.

Oh yeah.

Keep this childish yet dangerous behavior in mind because Swaine then suggests:

Only the United States can alter China's calculus toward Taiwan in ways that would facilitate a military drawdown and genuine movement toward a more stable cross-strait military and political relationship. It is time for Washington to consider negotiating directly with Beijing, in consultation with Taipei, a set of mutual assurances regarding Chinese force levels and deployments, on the one hand, and major U.S. arms sales and defense assistance to Taiwan, on the other hand—linked to the eventual opening of a cross-strait political dialogue on the status of Taiwan. Success in such an effort would be difficult but not impossible. It would require political courage, diplomatic acumen, and a recognition that the current U.S. approach to Taiwan is probably unsustainable and could prove disastrous.

Would China keep such an agreement? Hahaha see history, Tibet. See FTAs with nations around it.

If an agreement on force levels and deployments were reached, how could it distinguish between forces poised to hit the Senkakus or the South China Sea and those aimed at Taiwan, especially with Taiwan having a major base in the Spratlys?

Swaine means that Taiwan must be in some way handed over to Beijing, since Beijing cannot accept any other outcome. This will just mean more demands, since the US will have shown that Beijing's current tactics will produce successful, low-cost outcomes.

As I have pointed out before in my criticisms of similar proposals, such ideas make sense only when Taiwan is isolated from the broader context of Chinese territorial expansion. Except, as I have also pointed out countless times, Taiwan cannot be isolated from that broader context because it is entangled in it, both in the way Chinese minds envision their nation's territorial expansion, and in the very practical way of having a base in the South China Sea.

Think Taipei will give that base up?

How can a nation that allegedly launches a billion cyberattacks on just one of your firms per day be trusted with anything as important as this kind of agreement? Would you accept an assurance from it?
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It's logical to assume that many of those billion or so attacks on Raytheon's networks originate in China, but wrong to conclude that they all do. There are many countries/renegade provinces other than the PRC that would like to know what's on Raytheon's networks and have the capability to find out.

Good analysis, but sweeping, unsubstantiated claims about the PRC can undermine your overall arguments, which are often valid.

The politicians would be bored to death if things were nice and rosy. Neighbor can say "I got them to downgrade from new ACs." TW can say "we got what we really wanted, and saved lots of money, whew!!!". US can say "we showed those guys in the east we have the final say." Now the audience is going to holler "boo", not exciting. So the game has to go through another round to give the audience a show. Will the cat ever catch it's tail?

The depopulation of the Americas alone could not have cooled the climate because the climate was cooling before the Americas were depopulated. Temperatures started to fall towards the end of the 14th century. This much more rigorous approach (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4755328.stm) is more instructive. Remember that parts of Eurasia were far more densely populated than the Americas were. And there was far more farming going on. The Black Death killed off enormous numbers of people in both Europe and in China. Much of the land they farmed then began to grow back in. The numbers also add up. CO2 would not start falling right after the Indians started dying. It would take some time for this to happen. However, it is possible that warming was slowed in later centuries by the additional die-offs in the Americas. Remember that the Black Death probably killed over 70 million people in densely populated areas. While a similar number of Indians died off, they lived on a continent that had been significantly less defoliated at the time of their passing.

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